I was taking a walk in a park near my room, I often go there when I want to breathe some fresh air after a long study session or when I feel anxious. The reason why I go to this specific park is, other than being easy to reach, the presence of a public book crossing shelf. There are many of those, scattered across the city, and people can go there and leave or take any book. If nobody is greedy and everyone leaves and takes the exact amount, then there would be a constant number of books always changing. In reality, some people are more generous than others and overall there is always a good amount of books, at least 20 in this one. As always, I am curious to see whether there are new books and if any of them interest me, so I go to the location. As a side note, I like this place so much that I marked It and other places in openstreetmap so that their location is registered for others to use.

When I reached the little hose, what I found was a patch of dirt surrounded by grass. Maybe I was mistaken about the place, so I went back and forth on the street, but I was not mistaken. Indeed the shelf was not there anymore, apparently It was decided that It had to be removed from the park and It's now gone.

This reminded me that everything, even good things change. Nothing is really forever. Obviously this is something I already knew and experienced, and I accepted It. Likewise, we humans change both as spices and as individuals in our short lifetime. Previously I was reading some entries of my diary from three years ago, I noticed that the things that moved me and the things I did as a consequence of these were completely different. Yet some things are still the same, It's always me but the perspective is different and how I perceived the world is different.

When you look back at history you see how so many things change drastically. We went from horses as a means of transportation to space rockets in less than a century thanks to human ingenuity. When you look really back, think about the Roman Empire or civilizations now lost to time, the changes are so great that It is difficult even to imagine how the world was at that time. Yet some things are the same, the mountains that surround my city have been there for millennial. Once, these mountains were seen as obstacles that you needed to circumvent to reach other cities. During the first world war they were seen as a military fortress to protect the border, now they are seen as nature to protect.

I now feel stoic about things changing, I see this as a rule of life so I don't feel bad when things do change. That works either way for things that disappear and things that appear. What I can do is to hold tight what I wish to keep with me longer to delay the inevitable.

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Travel: Ephemeris, Index